As regular readers know, after decades of getting stuck in a rut with all my sad old '80s and '90s music from high school and college, in 2008 I decided to finally get off my ass and start exploring contemporary pop music again, mostly through the now explosive world of blogs and podcasts that actually hand out promotional MP3s for new albums being released, essentially bypassing traditional radio altogether; specifically, I challenged myself at the beginning of that year to eventually replace all 150 songs on my 1-gig iPod Shuffle with contemporary music as quickly as I could, essentially twelve CDs' worth of music but not literally twelve CDs, but rather 150 radio-style singles, all of which I liked enough to bother downloading and keeping in the first place. (In fact, I chronicled this year-long challenge with a series of essays throughout 2008, which are available as a free electronic book over at my arts center's website, for those who would like to read more about the sometimes surprising conclusions I came to regarding it all.) And indeed, the challenge was a big success, to the point where these days I find and keep around a CD's worth of new music every single week now, which if I was still using my old Shuffle would mean a complete turnover of its contents about once every three months, literally like how a commercial radio station works.

One of the genres I've been getting really into during this "second indie renaissance" of mine is electronica, which has really just expanded in the overall music industry in a way we literally couldn't have even envisioned back when I was in college, and that has spawned a whole series of subgenres we would've never been able to even imagine; I could name dozens, but just take for one good example the rise of so-called "math rock," which essentially combines the sounds and rhythms of electronic music with the high energy of a live indie-rock show, a style of music that I suppose has its roots in such '80s experiments as Devo and Kraftwerk, but is an altogether rawer, more visceral experience than anything those two bands ever tried to do. (Or to think of it another way, a band like Devo took the sweaty reality of rock clubs and tried to impose a clean, shiny sterility to it, while math rock takes the antiseptic environment of a club DJ booth and tries to introduce an earthy, chaotic element to it.) Like I said, there are dozens of such sub-definitions in the world of electronic music now, a world that contains thousands of artists and that is now embraced in a live context in a way that would've made us laugh back in the '80s and early '90s, back when even a night of avant-garde live electronic music at some museum was considered a rare and weird event.

And the more I explore and learn about this scene, the more amazed I am by the business side of it all; because for all the talk recently about sampling and monetization and intellectual property and "pay what you want" experiments, it is electronica that has more quickly and passionately embraced these attitudes than just about any other subsect of any artistic discipline at all, with a lot of electronic artists no longer even attempting to make money from the music they produce, but rather seeing the singles as yet one more easy way to promote their live shows, tours and merchandise, no different than a MySpace account or a stack of club flyers. And so that leads for one example to just a tremendous amount now of "remixes" in this electronic world, where every time an artist releases a new song, two or five or a dozen other artists will take that song and cut it up and put it back together again in an interesting new way, and do the same for these other artists when they release their own new songs. And I mean, obviously some of this is above-board and all worked out in advance -- to cite one example, the Bacardi Rum company actually sponsors an entire remix series, and given their corporate nature I'm sure that they're legally crossing all their T's and dotting all their I's before any of those remixes are actually allowed to be released under the Bacardi name. But given just the sheer number of remixes that show up at these blogs and podcasts -- dozens and dozens of them every week -- I just know that a large number of them are being done without the original artists' knowledge or permission.

For this community to work rather smoothly under such circumstances, then, instead of being bogged down in an endless series of petty lawsuits like you see right now in top-40 music among the major labels, says something profound about the arts in the 2000s, I think, providing more general lessons that can be successfully adopted by all kinds of other forms of creative output. Because like I said, the main reason all these artists don't go apeshit over all these unauthorized remixes out there is mostly because they have changed the very way they even think about intellectual property; that as long as the original crediting information is still attached to these mash-ups of their work, for the most part they see it as simply free advertising, a case of other people literally running around doing their promotional work for them, raising their stature in the electronic world and thus getting them more gigs, better pay, bigger live audiences, a chance to go on television, etc etc etc. Because I should mention that this is the glue that holds the entire thing together, that there seems to be a sort of "gentleman's code" in the industry regarding these reappropriating artists correctly attributing the songs they're remixing; in fact, it seems that among remixers who want to be taken seriously by these blogs and podcasts, the standard action is to always list these remixes by the original artist's name and title, then only adding on the actual remix information in parentheses afterwards.

Without this attribution, then yes, such remixes would simply be stealing; but what amazes me is that once this attribution is given, how many electronic musicians don't really care if a bunch of strangers are out there cutting up their songs into new shapes or including them in longer "mixtapes," and in fact in many cases see it as a compliment, a sign that they've finally "arrived" in the scene and that their songs are popular enough to want to be remixed and re-distributed in the first place. And I'm sure that part of this is that electronic music is a pretty recursive genre on its own, fundamentally based on throwaway music where only a finite amount of sounds are mixed together in evermore subtle ways; and I'm sure that part of this is that electronic music is fundamentally digital and therefore virtual from the first step to the last, and relies much more on the internet and massive electronic sharing than other forms of music do; and I'm sure that part of this is that electronic musicians tend to be a nerdy lot, and therefore are already worshipping the online philosophers like Cory Doctorow and Clay Shirky who are busy writing essays on why all this makes sense in the first place. But whatever the reasons, despite the horror stories the mainstream record industry tells about the evils of piracy and sampling, in the world of contemporary electronica this has all combined to produce a thriving, happy, cooperative community, one that right now is seeing more artists and generating more revenue than at any other time in the genre's history.

I've been thinking about all this a lot over the last two years, not just since starting this iPod challenge but since starting up my arts center's publishing program around the same time; because for those who don't know, CCLaP's publishing program has so far been an only electronic one, sort of foretelling the ubiquitous rise in ebook readers that is just starting to happen now, and so far all of CCLaP's books have been released under a "pay what you want" system, which means statistically that so far about 80 percent of CCLaP's customers have now read the center's books completely for free, with the center's full permission and encouragement. (For those who are curious, by the way, of those 20 percent of readers who make voluntary payments, over two titles now they've been donating an average of around eight dollars apiece, and combined total readership for both books is about 1,500 people now.) So that has me thinking about the issues that come with digital media and monetization in a way that a lot of other publishers aren't yet; and I have to say, at this point I've been pretty much sold on what these electronic musicians believe too, and plan on gearing CCLaP's publishing program much more along the lines of what's happening among cutting-edge musicians these days than anything you currently see in the traditional publishing world.

I mean, let's just start with the most obvious issue staring us in the face -- that instead of seeing those above numbers and getting pissed about the 1,200 freeloaders in CCLaP's audience, like a lot of publishers are tempted to do, I simply acknowledge them as 1,200 extra readers we wouldn't have without the free version, 1,200 people who are out there talking about the books and promoting the books and becoming passionate fans of the books' authors, versus the mere 300 so-so fans we'd have if we offered only the pay version. And in fact this number directly corresponds to the sales figures of most basement-press books these days -- that even when released on paper in traditional brick-and-mortar stores, most such titles are lucky to sell just a few hundred copies altogether, and in many cases mere dozens. (And the situation's not that much better for mainstream publishers, either; according to Publishers Weekly, once you remove the 40 or 50 titles each year that are massive bestsellers, the remaining tens of thousands of titles published in the US each year sell a national average of only 1,500 copies apiece.) I instead choose to find it more important that people are actually talking about CCLaP's books, that they are influencing the general popular culture around them, that they are helping to define what's going on in the arts instead of merely being a reflection; and in this there is a double benefit to CCLaP's pricing scheme, in that it not only gets the book into a profoundly larger amount of hands, but gives people an immediate interesting and unique thing to talk about regarding these books.

Just take for example a recent appearance on WGN radio here in Chicago by one of the authors I've published, Ben Tanzer, who was appearing with a group of other writers to talk about the upcoming Printers Row Book Fair; but just as soon as Ben mentioned the pricing structure of his book with CCLaP, as well as saying that magic phrase that journalists oh so love to hear -- "You know, just like Radiohead!" -- suddenly the entire conversation was shifted into this pricing scheme and the future of literature, and you ended up having CCLaP instead of the fair talked about for an entire ten minutes of that fifteen-minute segment. That simply wouldn't have happened without this unique and interesting aspect of it all, which is the lesson that so many small publishers don't seem to understand -- that in a world of fractured media, a world where hundreds of small presses are putting out thousands of titles a year just in the US alone, it's no longer enough simply to be good at what you do, or to be dedicated to putting out the kinds of titles that the mainstream presses won't. That's a huge problem in the publishing industry right now, is that those attracted to it in the 2000s tend to be extremely old-fashioned; and a lot of these people like to pretend in their heads that it's still 1956, and that their basement press is fated to one day be another City Lights or Paris Review breakout hit based only on the quality of their books alone, not even beginning to understand that we now live in a very different world, where the rise of a single organization based on editorial choices alone is now a practical impossibility, and especially in a world where the most avant-garde artist out there can now run their own instant free distribution network merely by signing up for a Blogger account.

But of course, none of this takes into account the other half of CCLaP's publishing plans, the thing that hasn't officially started yet and that the last two years have been basically a long build-up for, which is the paper side of things; and in this I am also taking a cue from how the smartest musicians out there these days are doing things, via embracing the fundamental idea that in a digital world, it's not the actual intellectual property that is worth any money anymore (or at least, not in a world where that intellectual property can be immediately and infinitely reproduced with no loss of quality, by any random teenager with a minimum of skills), but rather the pretty physical package that that intellectual property comes shipped in. Because for those who don't know (and yes, I know, I've talked about this a lot here before already), CCLaP's plans for paper publishing don't include traditional trade-paperbacks at all, but rather a much smaller amount of extremely high-end hardback "art books," hand-bound and with color illustrations inserted on vellum pages, on archival cotton paper and with a signature page and everything. The idea, then, is to sell just a hundred of these for $75, $100 apiece, just to that writer's most passionate fans, as well as those who professionally acquire fine-art books for collectible purposes, and to simply keep handing the electronic version out for free to those who simply want to read the story; if I were to sell out such a print run of the center's first book, for example, that would generate a total of $10,000, or the exact same amount I would make by selling a thousand trade-paperbacks for ten bucks apiece. And I gotta tell you, in all honesty, I think I have a fuck of a lot better chance of selling a hundred copies of a fancy, expensive coffeetable-type art book than a thousand copies of a normal cheap paperback, given that I'm only averaging 750 readers of each title even when the books are completely free.

Again, it all boils down to what I said before, the thing that the electronica community is rapidly figuring out long before any of the rest of us -- that in a world where information can be instantly distributed to billions around the world at once, so cheaply as to realistically be free, then the actual words on a page, the actual notes in your ear, no longer have any intrinsic monetary value of their own, but rather only the unique products and experiences that are wrapped around that content, like going with your friends to a concert hall to hear those notes, or reading those words in a handsome book that can be considered an artistic object unto itself. And so that's what I'm working towards right now, to be able to put out CCLaP's first high-end paper book by this time a year from now, which is going to require startup money of $2,000 -- five hundred so I can take a bookbinding class at the Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College, then $1,500 for the book itself. (Yes, I plan on spending fifteen dollars per book just on raw material; it should give you a good idea of just how high-end I plan on these being.)

And so that's what CCLaP's coming fundraisers this winter will be about, raising this two thousand dollars in seed money I'll need to do the center's first paper book; for example, our first fundraiser is going to be a formal sit-down dinner party in November, just for the fans of CCLaP with the best-paying jobs, $50 a plate which gets you a five-course meal and an evening of free entertainment, plus a chance to hub-bub with your fellow creative-class arts fans and local movers-and-shakers, which if I can get twenty people to sign up for would generate a thousand dollars in revenue, minus of course the roughly $200 in raw ingredients for the meal itself. So we'll see how it goes, of course, although I have a feeling that it's not going to be too terribly difficult to raise that kind of money by next spring, which will let me take my class and then be ready to actually make the center's first book by next summer. And that after four years will finally give CCLaP its first opportunity to start making serious money, money in the thousands instead of dozens of dollars; and needless to say, I'm highly looking forward to that day finally arriving.

Anyway, that's it for me today; and as always, I hope things are going well with you too these days. Next time, a mid-year report on how my "Summer of Museums" project is going, which by then will have included five of its twelve stops -- the Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Clarke and Glessner House Museums in the historic Prairie Avenue district, and the Chicago Nature Museum. (Those links above take you to my Flickr photosets of each visit, for those who want to check out the detailed individual reports right now.) See you!